Oracle has joined the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, an industry consortium that develops open standards and tools for parallel acceleration and execution.

The HSA Foundation is developing an open specification to allow Java code to be written once and deployed easily across PCs, servers, gaming consoles, and mobile devices. Native support in JVMs is expected in 2015.

The Multicore Association is pushing APIs to reduce the complexity involved in writing software for multicore chips.

Intel has released a beta version of its Intel Parallel Composer for Windows. The company plans to create a family of tools that will speed up the shift to parallel computing and the creation of applications able to run on multicore...